New Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM)
project launched to rewrite the rulebook for management of virtualized
networks and services; six NFV-related Catalysts slated for TM Forum
Live! in Nice, France, take practical solutions and implementation
approach

Mobile World Congress 2014

February 24, 2014 10:44 AM Eastern Standard Time

BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As demand for elastic and software-defined network (SDN) capabilities
rise, service providers are facing a digital transformation of the way
they build and operate their networks and manage services. The
transformation opens up a new wave of innovations and business growth
opportunities, but requires reimagined operations practices to realize
the promise of this new approach, including flexible, personalized
services and drastically decreased time-to-market. To provide a
blueprint for these new practices, today, TM
Forum is launching its new Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and
Management (ZOOM)
project.

The Vision of ZOOM

Led by TM Forum and supported by the world’s leading providers and
suppliers, including AT&T, IBM, Huawei, Oracle, Orange and Telecom
Italia, ZOOM’s goal is to define a vision of the new virtualized
operations environment, and a management architecture based on the
seamless interaction between physical and virtual components that can
easily and dynamically assemble personalized services.

In addition, ZOOM aims to identify and define new security approaches to
protect infrastructure, functions and servicesacross all layers
of software and hardware; and complement ongoing work within the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and other
organizations so that the Forum and its members are working together
with other industry leaders to provide the management platform and
transformation guidance to support successful deployment of network
functions virtualization (NFV).

TM Forum and its members are already working on ZOOM’s tangible outputs
as part of the Forum’s renowned Collaboration
program. This work includes specialized NFV workshops, Action Week
working sessions, and six ground-breaking Catalyst
proof-of-concept projects, or rapid collaborative projects, driven by
Forum member companies that will demonstrate their first results in just
four months at TM
Forum Live!, June 2-5, in Nice, France.

“The pressure for IT and operational agility to enable new digital
service revenues, and continuing demand for cost reduction makes it
essential to radically rethink network, operations and service
management. Virtualized environments can open up previously unimaginable
expectations for service personalization, speed, flexibility, automation
and customer centricity,” said Nik Willetts, chief strategy officer, TM
Forum. “ZOOM brings together the industry and the Forum’s extensive set
of best practices and standards to deliver practical answers for
game-changing operations concepts, including operations, adaptive
automation and customer-created service definitions.”

NFV Workshops and Action Week

To date, TM Forum has held three NFV management workshops for its
members beginning with Action Week in Baltimore in June, 2013. Second
and third workshops followed at Digital
Disruption 2013 in San Jose, Calif., and in December at TM Forum’s
headquarters in Morristown, NJ. The Forum incorporated the output of
those workshops to accelerate the work at Action
Week in Madrid (Feb. 10-14) which featured five days of sessions
focused on virtualized technologies like NFV and SDN, and the impact
they will have on the operations management.

At TM Forum Action Week in Madrid, members including Alcatel-Lucent,
AT&T, Ciena, HP, Huawei, Microsoft, Oracle, Orange, Sprint and others,
validated the ZOOM concepts as part of the project launch. The meetings
focused on detailed technical discussions on a number of management and
operations challenges for NFV, including the operational management of
virtualized infrastructure, TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) model
and NFV requirements, enterprise-to-enterprise service level agreement
management, policy management, security and more.

TM Forum Live!

Since the first NFV workshop in Baltimore, the Forum’s members have been
working together to form six NFV-related Catalyst projects slated for TM
Forum Live! as a way to validate proposed solutions and verify the
practical aspects of NFV implementations. The following Catalysts
address a wide range of topics including management over multi-provider
networks, service bundling using open APIs, and building an NFV
management framework using TM Forum’s Frameworx best practices and
standards.

Management of Ecosystems of Virtual Machines using SDN and NFV in
Enterprises and WANs

In addition,TM Forum will delve into NFV
and SDN during a two-day track at TM Forum Live! Speakers from
Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, HP, Huawei, Orchestral Networks,
SaskTel, Telefonica, Telstra, Time Warner Cable, ZTE and more will cover
the core topics of TM Forum’s Frameworx and network virtualization;
adding SDN and NFV to existing operations and billing support systems;
monetizing virtualized networks; and exploring the boundaries of
virtualization.

The TM Forum Live! conference and expo series brings together all the
elements of TM Forum’s focus on leading the successful transformation of
service providers and enterprises to help them succeed in the digital
world. TM Forum Live! is the Forum’s flagship event and features its
industry-leading Excellence
Awards.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a global trade association trusted by the world’s largest
enterprises, service providers and suppliers to help them continuously
transform to succeed in the digital economy. We help our members reduce
costs and risks, improve business agility and grow their business
through a wealth of knowledge, tools, standards, training and practical
advice.

We bring together more than 85,000 professionals from 900+ member
companies to share experiences, collaborate and rapidly solve critical
business challenges including IT transformation, business process
optimization, big data analytics, cloud management, customer experience
management and cyber security. Our three strategic programs—Agile
Business and IT, Customer Engagement and Open Digital —enable us to
provide a platform for overcoming the barriers to an open digital
world. For more information about TM Forum, visit www.tmforum.org